Thursday, June 30, 2011

16 weeks

LAZY THOUGHT BUBBLES POST

Things are still chugging along here. I'm feeling ...well....HUGE. Seriously. It's out of control. Not a ton of weight gain but I'm so firmly into maternity clothes it's not even funny. At 16 weeks. I can't figure it out. I was barely - and I mean barely - showing at this point with A2 ..and not at all with the golden child.

Baby A2 turned 2 (two!?!?) last week. We had a really, really good time and celebrated over 2 days. He thoroughly enjoyed everything about the birthday celebration ...especially the Elmo and Cookie Monster cake pops and blowing out candles. Seventy four times blowing out candles. So much fun.

We had the kids wear "oldest" and "middle" child shirts to the birthday party and finally came out of the closet to my family. They felt mildly silly when I pointed out that I was wearing maternity clothes.

I'm not even kidding when I say that waiting 16 weeks to tell family (including my mom!) gave me a new understanding of how women and teens try to hide their pregnancies. Every day that went by made me more reluctant to tell people and more worried about what their reactions would be. I made myself sick with anxiety about it on the morning of the party ....and then everything was fine.

No more bleeding for now ...though I've had some pretty intense cramping on a couple of days. I remain pretty nervous ....actually, very nervous.

I'm still so. freaking. short of breath. It's to the point now where it significantly limits my activity. I talked to a cardiologist that I work pretty closely with about it and he dragged me up to his office for an echocardiogram right away yesterday while I was at work. I was about ready to throw up waiting for the tech to put the ultrasound on me. About half way through the test, the cardiologist walked in the room to tell me what he was seeing. This was bad for a couple of reasons:

A doctor I work with every single day walked in to see me laying on a cart topless with naked disgusting I just breastfed for 2 years and now I'm pregnant again boobs. I don't know that he'll ever recover from that image.

Him giving me a play by play of what he was seeing was not nearly as reassuring as you would think it would be. He told me right away that my ejection fraction was normal - which WAS a huge relief. It was what I was worried most about. No evidence of pregnancy induced cardiomyopathy. Then he says to the tech, "Is that real?" to which she responds, "Not sure yet." And then I committed myself to an inpatient psychiatric ward. The end. No seriously ...he thought that he saw a significant anomaly in the septal wall of my heart but wanted to confirm after the test was done. I was on late shift this week, so he came down to find me in the ER around 11 p.m. and said he wanted a couple of extra images. I nearly pooped my pants. In the end - everything turned out fine. He thinks it's a normal variant when he got the extra pictures, but wants to follow up after pregnancy. Umm.. Geezus. It was a nerve wracking couple of hours.

Now we just sit back and wait. Next ultrasound in a few weeks....should find out gender. Still waiting for the results of the NT scan. We won't even go there yet.

How's everything with all of you?? I suck at commenting...mostly because I can read blogs at work but get blocked from commenting by the censors. Incredibly annoying. I'm working on it ...I promise.

2 comments:

I guess having the third one close to the second one made you pop faster.

I forgot about your breathing thing. When I was pregnant, I had a lot of shortness of breath around the start of the 3rd trimester. I always figured it was due to the baby being so large and up high. I don't remember when it went away exactly... at birth or when he dropped, but it went away so all was good. But now, just the other week it started up again out of the blue. It's like I can't take a deep breath and I'm struggling to breathe. I went to a family practice doc (that I don't love) hoping to get a referral and all I got were orders for a breathing test and a chest x-ray. I think this doc is wasting my time with useless tests. Now I'm going to add cariodmyopathy to my list of things to worry about.